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**Official THIEF-Incorporating AMD™ Mantle™/True Audio™/Bench mark Thread**

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Caporegime
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http://www.anandtech.com/show/7868/evaluating-amds-trueaudio-and-mantle-thief/2

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Looking first at the R9 290X, we can see that even at our modified Very High settings, there are still some small performance gains to be had from enabling Mantle. Switching out Direct3D for Mantle gets us another 3.6fps, or a 5% boost in performance. As we would expect however, a far more significant gain can be found when using Low settings. He we can see the 290X top out at 86.8fps with D3D – indicating that our earlier Very High settings weren’t all that far from being CPU bottlenecked – while Mantle boosts that up to 117.7fps, for a gain of 30.9fps or 36%.

From a practical perspective we would expect most 290X owners to be playing at settings similar to Very High, so the performance gains, though appreciated, aren’t especially influential in the long run. But it does give us some idea of what to expect.

Meanwhile if we start slowing down the CPU to just 2 cores at 3.3GHz, we can see the Mantle performance advantage grow. In this CPU bottlenecked scenario the performance gains from enabling Mantle are anywhere between 33% for Very High settings to a rather sizable 49% when using Low settings. This scenario, though contrived, makes for a good reminder of how significantly the current Direct3D rendering pipeline can bottleneck a GPU in the wrong (right?) circumstances.

  • Mantle performance for GPUs with 2GB framebuffers will receive additional optimization in a future application path for Thief™. Currently, these products may see limited gains in scenarios requiring large amount of video memory (e.g. maximum detail settings with SSAA enabled).
  • Multi-GPU support under the Mantle codepath will be added to Thief in a future application patch
  • As with other first-person titles, relatively smaller gains will be observed in GPU-bound scenarios
 
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Caporegime
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Really? Well that is disappointing :( I though my system would be a good test for Mantle, with my crappy CPU and all.

Don't take this the wrong way but Thief isn't demanding at all and unless you seriously want to hear the TrueAudio (which by all accounts is also poor), I couldn't understand why people waited to play it. The Bench test is the most demanding aspect of this game and people with CF cards can't run CF with Mantle but can with DX....
 
Soldato
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Don't take this the wrong way but Thief isn't demanding at all and unless you seriously want to hear the TrueAudio (which by all accounts is also poor), I couldn't understand why people waited to play it. The Bench test is the most demanding aspect of this game and people with CF cards can't run CF with Mantle but can with DX....

TrueAudio Poor :eek: :p How can you say that?
 
Caporegime
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TrueAudio Poor :eek: :p How can you say that?

In any case, on a purely subjective evaluation, I don’t feel that Thief is a strong showcase for TrueAudio. The question isn’t one of technical merit – audio DSPs aren’t new and have proven their value – but rather whether the game is a good example of what the technology can do and how it’s used. And since Thief only uses it for convolution reverb, and I feel uses that reverb too heavily, I would most likely play with the effect turned off, thereby bypassing the TrueAudio hardware entirely.

From Anand's Thief review.

Thief and True Audio combined = Manchester United :D
 
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